Nineteen days to the phony elections in Iraq, where a crusty old ayatollah will be crowned king and pro-Iranian parties will form the core of the new Iraqi army, and we can expect new missteps every day by the United States until then.
According to Juan Cole, the United States has rejected one of the last “last chances” for a deal to unify Iraq with the Sunni establishment. From “Informed Comment”:
The US rejected on Monday a proposal from the Sunni Association of Muslims Scholars that the US declare a timetable for withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, in return for which the AMS would lift its boycott of the elections and would accept the resulting government as legitimate even if it was Shiite-dominated.
The US spokesman said that the US was not prepared to announce a timetable for withdrawal, and that it would be premature to do so before the new elected Iraqi government was formed.
Now, I am no fan of the Association of Muslim Scholars, which is a right-wing Islamist group fronting for the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Sunni establishment in Iraq is broad and complex, with ties to multiple tribes, to the former Baath and other pillars of civil society. As Brent Scowcroft pointed out last week, the elections will destabilize Iraq by marginalizing the Sunnis. Not only that, but I suspect the Kurds won’t be too happy with a government dominated by turban-wearing religious Shiites either, and that they wil express their annoyance by trying to push the Sunni Arabs out of oil-rich Kirkuk before they declare a (doomed) independent Kurdistan.
